It was towards the close of the month of November, in 1779, that Lord Lyttelton left London and its fatal allurements for a few days' peaceful life at his country seat, Pit Place, at Epsom (in those days a fashionable health resort), where he had invited a house-party, including several ladies, to join him. And, it should be said, no host could possibly be more charming and gracious; for, in spite of his depraved tastes, Lord Lyttelton was a man of remarkable fascination—a wit, a born raconteur, and a courtier to his finger-tips.

During the first day of his residence at Epsom the following incident—which may or may not have had a bearing on the strange events that followed—took place.

"Lord Lyttelton," to quote Sir Digby Neave, "had come to Pit Place in very precarious health, and was ordered not to take any but the gentlest exercise. As he was walking in the conservatory with Lady Affleck and the Misses Affleck, a robin perched on an orange-tree close to them. Lord Lyttelton attempted to catch it, but failing, and being laughed at by the ladies, he said he would catch it even if it was the death of him. He succeeded, but he put himself in a great heat by the exertion. He gave the bird to Lady Affleck, who walked about with it in her hand."

On the following morning his lordship appeared at the breakfast-table so pale and haggard that his guests, alarmed at his appearance, asked what was the matter. For a time he evaded their enquiries, and then made the following startling statement:—"Last night," he said, "after I had been lying in bed awake for some time, I heard what sounded like the tapping of a bird at my window, followed by a gentle fluttering of wings about my chamber. I raised myself on my arm to learn the meaning of these strange sounds, and was amazed at seeing a lovely female, dressed in white, with a small bird perched like a falcon on her hand. Walking towards me, the vision spoke, commanding me to prepare for death, for I had but a short time to live. When I was able to command my speech, I enquired how long I had to live. The vision then replied, 'Not three days; and you will depart at the hour of twelve.'"

Such was the remarkable story with which Lord Lyttelton startled his guests on the morning of 24th November 1779. In vain they tried to cheer him, and to laugh away his fears. They could make no impression on the despondency that had settled on him; they could not shake the conviction that he was a doomed man. "You will see," was all the answer he would vouchsafe, "I shall die at midnight on Saturday."

But in spite of this alarming experience and the gloomy forebodings to which, in his shattered state of nerves, it gave birth, Lord Lyttelton did not long allow it to interfere with the work he had in hand, the preparation of a speech on the disturbed condition in Ireland which he was to deliver in the House of Lords that very day—a speech which should enhance his great and rapidly growing reputation as an orator. He spent some hours absorbed in polishing and repolishing his sentences, and in verifying his facts; and, when he rose in the House, he was as full of confidence as of his subject.

Never, it was the common verdict, had his lordship spoken with more eloquence and lucidity or with more powerful grasp of his subject and his hearers.

"Cast your eyes for a moment," he declared, amid impressive silence, "on the state of the Empire. America, that vast Continent, with all its advantages to us as a commercial and maritime people—lost—for ever lost to us; the West Indies abandoned; Ireland ready to part from us. Ireland, my lords, is armed; and what is her language? 'Give us free trade and the free Constitution of England as it originally was, such as we hope it will remain, the best calculated of any in the world for the preservation of freedom.'"

It was the speech of a far-seeing statesman; and although it proved but the "voice of one crying in the wilderness," Lord Lyttelton felt that he had done his duty and had crowned his growing political fame with the laurels of the patriot and the orator.

On the following morning Fortescue met his cousin sauntering in St James's Park, as Mr Makower tells us, "with the idleness of one who has never known what occupation means."

"Is it because Hillsborough, the stupidest of your brother peers, paid you such fine compliments on your speech?" he asked.

Lyttelton smiled faintly. "No, it was not of that I was thinking," he answered. "Those are things of yesterday. Hillsborough was wrong; the majority who voted with him were wrong; and I was right with my minority. They don't know Ireland as I do. But a Government which can lose America can do anything. I have done with politics. I was thinking of something entirely different when you came upon me. I was thinking—of death."

Fortescue laughed. But, when he had heard the story of Lyttelton's dream, something in the manner of the narrator conveyed to him a feeling of uneasiness.

"No man has more thoroughly enjoyed doing wrong than I have," continued Lyttelton. "But I should not have enjoyed it so much if I believed in nothing. With me sin has been conscientious; and I enjoyed the wrong thing not only for itself but also because it was wrong. Suppose it be true that I have not more than three days to live—"

"You take the thing too seriously," interposed his cousin.

"Join me at Pit Place to-morrow," said Lyttelton. "Then you shall see if I take it too seriously."

During the intervening two days he fluctuated between profound gloom and boisterous hilarity. One hour he was plunged into the depths of despair, the next he was the soul of gaiety, laughing hysterically at his fears, and exclaiming, "I shall cheat the lady yet!"

During dinner on the third and fatal day he was the maddest and merriest at the table, convulsing all by his sallies of wit and his infectious high spirits; and, when the cloth was removed, he exclaimed jubilantly, "Ah, Richard is himself again!" But his gaiety was short-lived. As the hours wore on his spirits deserted him; he lapsed into gloom and silence, from which all the efforts of his friends could not rouse him.

As the night advanced he began to grow restless. He could not sit still, but paced to and fro, with terror-haunted eyes, muttering incoherently to himself, and taking out his watch every few moments to note the passage of time. At last, when his watch pointed to half-past eleven, he retired, without a word of farewell to his guests, to his bedroom, not knowing that not only his own watch, but every clock and watch in the house had been put forward half-an-hour by his anxious friends, "to deceive him into comfort."

Having undressed and gone to bed, he ordered his valet to draw the curtains at the foot, as if to screen him from a second sight of the mysterious lady, and, sitting up in bed, watch in hand, he awaited the fatal hour of midnight. As the minute hand slowly but surely drew near to twelve he asked to see his valet's watch, and was relieved to find that it marked the same time as his own. With beating heart and straining eyes he watched the hand draw nearer and nearer. A minute more to go—half a minute. Now it pointed to the fateful twelve—and nothing happened. It crept slowly past. The crisis was over. He put down the watch with a deep sigh of relief, and then broke into a peal of laughter—discordant, jubilant, defiant.

"This mysterious lady is not a true prophetess, I find," he said to his valet, after spending a few minutes in further mirthful waiting. "And now give me my medicine; I will wait no longer." The valet proceeded to mix his usual medicine, a dose of rhubarb, stirring it, as no spoon was at hand, with a tooth-brush lying on the table. "You dirty fellow!" his lordship exclaimed. "Go down and fetch a spoon."

When the servant returned a few minutes later he found, to his horror, his master lying back on the pillow, unconscious and breathing heavily. He ran downstairs again, shouting, "Help! Help! My lord is dying!" The alarmed guests rushed frantically to the chamber, only to find their host almost at his last gasp. A few moments later he was dead, with the watch still clutched in his hand, pointing to half-past twelve. He had died at the very stroke of midnight, as foretold by his ghostly visitant of three nights previously.

Thus strangely and dramatically died Thomas, second Lord Lyttelton, statesman, wit, and debauchee, precisely as he had been warned that he would die in a dream or vision of the night. How far his death was due to natural causes, to the effect of fear on a diseased heart, none can say with certainty. That his heart was diseased, that he had had many former seizures, during which his life seemed in danger, is beyond question; but if it was merely coincidence, it was surely the most remarkable coincidence on record, that his death should come at the exact moment foretold by the lady of his vision, as related by himself three days before the event.

Such a happening was strange and weird enough in all conscience; but it was no more inexplicable on natural grounds than what follows. Among Lord Lyttelton's boon companions was a Mr Andrews, with whom he had often discussed the possibilities of a future life. On one such occasion his lordship had said: "Well, if I die first, and am allowed, I will come and inform you."

The words were probably spoken more in jest than in earnest, and Mr Andrews no doubt little dreamt how the promise would be fulfilled. On the night of Lord Lyttelton's death Mr Andrews, who expected his lordship to pay him a visit on the following day, had retired to bed at his house at Dartford, in Kent.

When in bed, to quote from Mr Plumer Ward's "Illustrations of Human Life," he fell into a sound sleep, but was waked between eleven and twelve o'clock by somebody opening his curtains. It was Lord Lyttelton, in a nightgown and cap which Andrews recognised. He also spoke plainly to him, saying that he was come to tell him all was over. It seems that Lord Lyttelton was fond of horseplay; and, as he had often made Andrews the subject of it, the latter had threatened his lordship with physical chastisement the very next time that it should occur. On the present occasion, thinking that the annoyance was being renewed, he threw at Lord Lyttelton's head the first thing that he could find—his slippers. The figure retreated towards a dressing-room, which had no ingress or egress except through the bed-chamber; and Andrews, very angry, leaped out of bed in order to follow it into the dressing-room. It was not there, however.

Surprised and amazed, he returned at once to the bedroom, which he strictly searched. The door was locked on the inside, yet no Lord Lyttelton was to be found. In his perplexity, Mr Andrews rang for his servant, and asked if Lord Lyttelton had not arrived. The man answered: "No, sir." "You may depend upon it," said Mr Andrews, thoroughly mystified and out of humour, "that he is somewhere in the house. He was here just now, and he is playing some trick or other. However, you can tell him that he won't get a bed here; he can sleep in the stable or at the inn if he likes."

After a further vain search of the bed-chamber and the dressing-room, Mr Andrews returned to bed and to sleep, having no doubt whatever that his too jocular friend was in hiding somewhere near. On the afternoon of the following day news came to him that Lord Lyttelton had died the previous night at the very time that he (Mr Andrews) was searching for his midnight visitant, and abusing him roundly for what he considered his ill-timed practical joke. On hearing the news, we are told, Mr Andrews swooned away, and such was its effect on him that, to use his own words, "he was not himself or a man again for three years."



CHAPTER VI

A MESSALINA OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

There have been bad women in all ages, from Messalina, who waded recklessly through blood to the gratification of her passions, to that Royal mountebank, Queen Christina of Sweden, whose laughter rang out while her lover Monaldeschi was being foully done to death at her bidding by Count Sentinelli, his successor in her affections; and in this baleful company the notorious Lady Shrewsbury won for herself a dishonourable place by a lust for cruelty as great as that of Christina or Messalina, and by a Judas-like treachery which even they, who at least flaunted their crimes openly, would have blushed to practise.

No woman could have had smaller excuse for straying from the path of virtue, much less for making foul crimes the minister to her lust than Anna Maria, Countess of Shrewsbury. The descendant of a long line of honourable Brudenells, daughter of an Earl of Cardigan, there was nothing in the history of her family to account for the taint in her blood. She had been dowered with beauty and charms which made conquest easy, inevitable; and she was honourably wedded to a noble husband, the eleventh Earl of Shrewsbury, who, although a man of no great character or attainments, was an indulgent and faithful husband. Nor does she, until she had reached the haven of married life, appear to have shown any trace of the wickedness that must have been slumbering in her.

And yet, before she had worn her Countess's coronet a year, she had made herself notorious, even in Charles II.'s abandoned Court, for passions which would ruthlessly crush any obstacle in the way of their indulgence. Lover after lover, high-placed and base-born indifferently, succeeded one another in her fickle favour, as Catherine the Great's favourites trod one on the heels of the other, each in turn to be flung contemptuously aside to make room for a more favoured rival.

Even Gramont, seasoned man of the world and far removed from a saint as he was, was frankly horrified at the carryings-on of this English Messalina, compared with whom the most lax ladies of the English Court were veritable prudes. "I would lay a wager," he says, "that if she had a man killed for her every day she would only carry her head the higher. I suppose she must have plenary indulgence for her conduct." The only indulgence she had or needed was that of her own imperious will and her elastic conscience.

As we glance down the list of her victims, we see some of the most honourable names, and also some of the most despicable characters in the England of the Restoration. The Duke of Ormond's heir caught her capricious fancy for awhile; but, though his love for her drove him to the verge of suicide, she wearied of him and trampled him under foot to seek a fresh conquest.

To my Lord Arran succeeded Captain Thomas Howard, brother of the Earl of Carlisle, a shy, proud young man of irreproachable character, whose love for the fascinating Countess was as free from dishonour as a weakness for another man's wife could be. She caught him securely in the net of her charms, ensnared him with her beaute de diable, and then, satisfied with her ignoble triumph, proceeded to make a fool of him.

Nothing pleased this Countess more than to bring her lovers together, to watch with gloating eyes their rivalries, their jealousies, and their quarrels, which frequently led to her crowning enjoyment—the shedding of blood. And it was with this object that one day she induced Howard to join her at a petit souper at Spring Gardens, a favourite pleasure-haunt of the day, near Charing Cross. The supper had scarcely commenced when the tete-a-tete was interrupted by the appearance of none other than the "invincible Jermyn," one of the handsomest and most notorious roues of the day, a famous duellist, and one of my lady's most ardent lovers.

Here was a prospect of amusement such as was dear to the heart of the Countess, who, needless to say, had arranged the plot. Jermyn needed no invitation to make a third at the feast of love. That was precisely what he had come for; and although Howard played the host with admirable dignity to the unwelcome intruder, Jermyn ignored his courtesy and brought all his skill to bear on fanning the flames of his jealousy. He flirted outrageously with the Countess, kept her in peals of laughter by his sallies of wit and scarcely-veiled gibes at her companion, until Howard was roused to such a pitch of silent fury that only the presence of a lady restrained him from running the insolent intruder through with his sword. Nothing would have delighted her ladyship more than such a climax to the little play she was enjoying so much; but Howard, with marvellous self-restraint, kept his temper within bounds and his sword in its sheath.

Such an outrage, however, could not be passed over with impunity; and before Jermyn had eaten his breakfast on the following morning, Howard's friend and second, Colonel Dillon, was announced with a demand for satisfaction—a demand which met with a prompt acquiescence from Jermyn, who vowed he would "wipe the young puppy out." The duel took place in the "Long Alley near St James's, called Pall Mall," and proved to be of as sanguinary a nature as even the grossly-insulted Howard could have desired.

On the 19th of August 1662, Pepys writes:—

"Mr Coventry did tell us of the duel between Mr Jermyn, nephew to my Lord of St Alban's, and Colonel Giles Rawlins, the latter of whom is killed, and the first mortally wounded as it is thought. They fought against Captain Thomas Howard, my Lord Carlisle's brother, and another unknown; who, they say, had armour on that they could not be hurt, so that one of their swords went up to the hilt against it. They had horses ready and are fled. But what is most strange, Howard sent one challenge before, but they could not meet till yesterday at the old Pall Mall at St James's; and he would not till the last tell Jermyn what the quarrel was; nor do anybody know."

If no one else knew of the cause of the quarrel, certainly Jermyn did; and never did man pay a more deserved penalty for dastardly behaviour. Lady Shrewsbury's delight at thus ridding herself of two lovers, of both of whom she seems to have grown weary, may be better imagined than described. Although Jermyn was carried off the field of battle, to all appearance a dead man, he survived until 1708 when he died, full of years and wickedness, Baron Jermyn of Dover.

The Court, as Pepys records, was "much concerned in this fray"; but it was long before Lady Shrewsbury's part in it came to light, to add to the infamy which she had by that time heaped on herself. Her wayward fancy next settled on a man of a different stamp to either Howard or Jermyn. It seemed, indeed, to be her ambition to make her conquests as varied as humanity itself. Her next victim was Harry Killigrew, one of the most notorious profligates in London, a man of low birth and lower tastes, a haunter of taverns, the terror of all decent women, and a roystering swashbuckler, with a sword as ready to leap at a word as his lips to snatch a kiss from a pretty mouth.

Such was my Lady Shrewsbury's successor to the aristocratic, high-minded brother of Lord Carlisle. Killigrew's father was a well-known man of his day, for he wore cap and bells at Charles's Court, and was privileged to practise his clowning on King and courtier and maid-of-honour with no heavier penalty than a box on the ears. The extreme licence he permitted himself is proved by that joke at the expense of Louis XIV., which might well have cost any other man his head. Louis, who always unbended to a merry jester, was showing his pictures to Killigrew, when they came to a painting of the Crucifixion, placed between portraits of the Pope and the "Roi Soleil" himself. "Ah, Sire," said the Jester, as he struck an attitude before the trio of canvases, "I knew that our Lord was crucified between two thieves, but I never knew till now who they were."

Such was Tom Killigrew who kept Charles's Court alive by his pranks and jests, and who is better remembered in our day as the man to whose enterprise we owe Drury Lane Theatre and the Italian Opera; and it would have been better for the world of his day if his son had been as decent a man as himself. His fun, at least, was harmless, and his life, so far as we know it, was reasonably clean. His son, however, was notorious as the most foul-mouthed, evil-living man in London, whose very contact was a pollution. Once Pepys, always eager for new experiences, was inveigled into his company and that of the "jolly blades," who were his boon companions; "but Lord!" the diarist says ingenuously, "their talk did make my heart ache!"

That my Lady Shrewsbury should stoop to such a liaison astonished even those who knew how widely she cast her net, and how indiscriminating her passion was in its quest for novelty. That such a man should boast of his conquest over the beautiful Countess was inevitable. He published it in every low tavern in London, gloating in his cups over "his lady's most secret charms, concerning which more than half the Court knew quite as much as he knew himself."

Among those to whom Killigrew thus boasted was the dissolute second Duke of Buckingham, whose curiosity was so stimulated by what he heard that he entered the lists himself, and quickly succeeded in ousting Killigrew from his place in my lady's favour. To the tavern-sot thus succeeded the most splendid noble in England, a man who, in his record of gallantry, was no mean rival to the Countess herself. To be thus displaced by the man to whom he had boasted his conquest was a bitter blow to the libertine's vanity; to be cut dead by Lady Shrewsbury, who had no longer any use for him, roused him to a frenzy of rage in which he assailed her with the bitterest invectives; "painted a frightful picture of her conduct, and turned all her charms, which he had previously extolled, into defects." The Duke's warnings were powerless to stop his vindictive tongue; even a severe thrashing, which resulted in Killigrew begging abjectly for his life from his successful rival, failed to teach him prudence. His slanders grew more and more venomous until they brought on him a punishment which nearly cost him his life.

But before Killigrew's tongue was thus silenced, the wooing of the Duke and the Countess was marred by a tragedy, to which our history happily furnishes no parallel. The Countess's husband had hitherto looked on with seeming indifference, while lover after lover succeeded each other in his wife's favour. But even the Earl's long forbearance had its limits; and these were reached when he saw the insolent coxcomb, Buckingham, a man whom he had always detested, usurp his place. He screwed up his laggard manhood to the pitch of challenging the Duke to a duel, which took place one January morning in 1667, and of which Pepys tells the following story:

"Much discourse of the duel yesterday between the Duke of Buckingham, Holmes and one Jenkins, on one side, and my Lord Shrewsbury, Sir John Talbot and one Bernard Howard, on the other side; and all about my Lady Shrewsbury, who is at this time, and hath for a great while, been a mistress to the Duke of Buckingham. And so her husband challenged him, and they met yesterday in a close near Barne-Elmes, and there fought; and my Lord Shrewsbury is run through the body, from the right breast through the shoulder; and Sir John Talbot all along up one of his armes; and Jenkins killed upon the place, and the rest all, in a little measure, wounded. This will make the world think that the King hath good Councillors about him, when the Duke of Buckingham, the greatest man about him, is a fellow of no more sobriety than to fight about a mistress."

It is said that the Countess, in the guise of a page, accompanied her lover to the scene of this bloodthirsty duel; held his horse as, with sparkling eyes, she saw her husband receive his death-blow; and, when the foul deed was done, flung her arms around the assassin's neck in a transport of gratitude and affection. Never surely since Judas sent his Master to his death with a kiss has the world witnessed such an infamous betrayal.

From the scene of this tragedy the Duke escorted the Countess-page to his own home, where he installed her as his avowed mistress in the eyes of the world, at the same time ordering the carriage which was to take his outraged wife back to her father's house. Even in such an abandoned and profligate Court as that of Charles II., the news of this dastardly crime and Lady Shrewsbury's callous treachery was received with execration, while a thrill of horror and fierce indignation ran through the whole of England. But the Countess and her paramour smiled at the storm they had brought on their heads, and with brazen insolence flaunted their amour in the face of the world.

Now that the Countess's husband had been removed from their path the shameless pair had time to attend to Killigrew, whose malicious tongue must be silenced once for all. They hired bravos to track his footsteps, and at a convenient moment to remove him from their path. The opportunity came one day when it was learnt that Killigrew, who seemed to know that his life was in danger and for a long time had evaded his enemies successfully, intended to travel from town to his house at Turnham Green late at night. His chaise was followed at a discreet distance by my Lady Shrewsbury, who arrived on the scene just in time to witness the prepared tragedy which was to crown her revenge. Killigrew, who was sleeping in his chaise, awoke, to quote a contemporary account,

"by the thrust of a sword which pierced his neck and came out at the shoulder. Before he could cry out he was flung from the chaise, and stabbed in three other places by the Countess's assassins, while the lady herself looked on from her own coach and six, and cried out to the murderers, 'Kill the villain!' Nor did she drive off till he was thought dead."

The man whose murder she thus witnessed and encouraged was not, however, Killigrew, as in the darkness she imagined, but his servant. Killigrew himself, although severely wounded, was more fortunate in escaping with his life. But the lesson he had received was so severe that for the rest of his days he gave the Countess and her lover the widest of berths, and retired into the obscurity in which alone he could feel safe from such a revengeful virago. This second crime, like its predecessor, went unpunished, so powerful was Buckingham, and so deep in the King's favour; and he and the Countess were left in the undisturbed enjoyment of their lust and their triumphs.

"Gallant and gay, in Clieveden's proud alcove, The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love,"

the infamous pair defied the world, and crowned their ignominy by standing together at the altar, where the Duke's chaplain made them one, almost before the body of the Countess's husband (who had survived his duel two months) was cold, and while the Duchess of Buckingham was, of course, still alive. The Countess was not long before her brazen effrontery carried her back to Court, where she took the lead in the revels and at the gaming-tables, and made love to the "Merrie Monarch" himself. Evelyn tells us that, during a visit to Newmarket, he

"found the jolly blades racing, dancing, feasting and revelling, more resembling a luxurious and abandoned rout than a Christian country. The Duke of Buckingham was in mighty favour, and had with him that impudent woman, the Countess of Shrewsbury, and his band of fiddlers."

It was only with the downfall of the Stuarts that this shameless alliance came to an end, when Buckingham's reign of power was over, and he was haled before the House of Lords to answer for his crimes. He and the partner of his guilt were ordered to separate; and for this purpose to enter into security to the King in the sum of L10,000 apiece. Thus ignominiously closed one of the most infamous intrigues in history. Buckingham, buffeted by fortune, rapidly fell, as the world knows, from his pinnacle of power to the lowest depths of poverty, to end his days, friendless and destitute, in a Yorkshire inn.

"No wit, to flatter, left of all his store! No fool to laugh at, which he valued more. There reft of health, of fortune, friends, And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends."

To my Lady Shrewsbury, as to her paramour, the condemnation of the Lords marked the setting of her sun of splendour. The slumbering rage of England against her long career of iniquity awoke to fresh life in this hour of her humiliation, and she was glad to escape from its fury to the haven of a convent in France, where she spent some time in mock penitence.

But the Countess was, by no means, resigned to end her days in the odour of a tardy and insincere piety. As soon as the sky had cleared a little across the Channel, she returned to England, and tried to repair her shattered fame by giving her hand to a son of Sir Thomas Bridges, of Keynsham, in Somerset, who was so enslaved by her charms that he was proud to lead the tarnished beauty to the altar. And with this mockery of wedding bells "Messalina's" history practically ended as far as the world, outside the Somersetshire village, where the remainder of her life was mostly spent, was concerned. The fires of her passion had now died out, and the restless and still ambitious woman exchanged love for political intrigue. She became the most ardent of Jacobites, and plotted as unscrupulously for the restoration of the Stuarts, as in earlier years she had planned the capture and ruin of her lovers.

Not content with treading the shady and dangerous path of intrigue herself, she set to work to undermine the loyalty of her only son, the young Earl of Shrewsbury, one of the most trusted ministers and friends of the Orange King; and such was her influence over the high-principled, if weak Earl that she infected him with her own treachery, until the man, whom William III. had called "the soul of honour," stood branded to the world as a spy, leagued with the King's enemies, and was compelled to leave England for ten years of exile and disgrace.

This corruption and ruin of her own son was the crowning infamy of one of the worst women who ever enlisted their beauty, of their own free will, in the service of the devil.



CHAPTER VII

A PROFLIGATE PRINCE

Of the sons of the profligate Frederick, Prince of Wales, Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, was, by universal consent, the most abandoned, as his eldest brother, George III., of "revered memory," in spite of his intrigue with the fair Quakeress, was the least vicious. Each brother had his amours—many of them highly discreditable; but for unrestrained and indiscriminate profligacy Henry Frederick took the unenviable palm.

Even the verdict of posterity is unable to credit this Princeling with a solitary virtue, unless a handsome face and a passion for music can be placed to his credit. In his career of female conquest, which began as soon as he had emancipated himself from his mother's apron strings, he left behind him a wake of ruined lives; not the least tragic of which was that of the lovely and foolish Henrietta Vernon, Countess Grosvenor, whom he dragged through the mire of the Divorce Court, only to fling her aside, a soiled and crushed flower of too pliant womanhood.

And yet, when his passion was in full flame, no woman was ever wooed with apparently more sincere ardour and devotion.

"My dear Angel," he once wrote to her, "I got to bed about ten. I then prayed for you, my dearest love, kissed your dearest little hair, and lay down and dreamt of you, had you ten thousand times in my arms, kissing you and telling you how much I loved and adored you, and you seemed pleased.... I have your heart, and it is warm at my breast. I hope mine feels as easy to you. Thou joy of my life, adieu!"

In another letter he exclaims:

"Oh, my dearest soul ... your dear heart is so safe with me and feels every motion mine does. How happy will that day be to me that brings you back! I shall be unable to speak for joy. My dearest soul, I send you ten thousand kisses."

So irrepressible was his passion that it burst the bounds of prose, and gushed forth in verses such as this:

"Hear, solemn Jove, and, conscious Venus, hear! And thou, bright maid, believe me while I swear, No time, no change, no future flame shall move The well-placed basis of my lasting love."

When the fair and frail Countess, in a fit of alarm, took refuge at Eaton Hall, her Royal lover followed her in disguise, installed himself at a neighbouring inn, and continued his intrigue under the very nose of her jealous husband, who at last was driven to sue for divorce. He won an easy verdict, and with it L10,000 damages—a bill which George III. himself had ultimately to pay. Within a few months the incorrigible Duke had another "dearest little angel" in his toils, and pursued his gallantries without a thought of the Countess he had left to her shame.

Such was this degenerate brother of the King when the most memorable of his victims crossed his blighting path one summer day in the year 1771, at Brighton—a radiantly beautiful young woman who had just discarded her widow's weeds, and was arrayed for fresh conquests.

Anne Luttrell, as the widow had been known in her maiden days, was one of the three lovely daughters of Lord Irnham, in later years Earl of Carhampton, and a member of a family noted for the beauty of its women, and the wild, lawless living of its men. Her brother, Colonel Luttrell, was the most reckless swashbuckler and the deadliest duellist of his time—a man whose morals were as low as his temper and courage were high.

At seventeen Anne had become the wife of Christopher Horton, a hard-drinking, fast-living Derbyshire squire, who left her a widow at twenty-two, in the prime of her beauty, and eager, as soon as decency permitted, to enter the matrimonial lists again.

About this time Horace Walpole, who had a keen eye for female charms, describes her as

"extremely pretty, very well-made, with the most amorous eyes in the world, and eyelashes a yard long. Coquette beyond measure, artful as Cleopatra, and completely mistress of all her passions and projects. Indeed, eyelashes three-quarters of a yard shorter would have served to conquer such a head as she has turned."

In another portrait Walpole says:

"There was something so bewitching in her languishing eyes, which she could animate to enchantment if she pleased, and her coquetry was so active, so varied, and yet so habitual, that it was difficult not to see through it, and yet as difficult to resist it. She danced divinely, and had a great deal of wit, but of the satiric kind."

Such were the charms and witchery of Mrs Horton when the lascivious young Prince, who was still a boy, was first dazzled by her beauty at Brighton; and when, in fact, she was on the eve of smiling on the suit of one of the legion of lovers who swelled her retinue, one General Smith, a handsome man with a seductive rent-roll to add to his attractions. But the moment the Prince began to cast admiring eyes at the young widow the General's fate was sealed. She had no fancy to go to her grave plain "Mrs Smith" when a duchess's coronet (and a Royal one to boot) was dangled so alluringly before her eyes.

For from the first she had made up her mind that she would be the Prince's legal wife, and no light-o'-love to be petted and flung aside when he chose, butterfly-like, to flit to some other flower; and this she made abundantly clear to Henry Frederick. Her favours—after a period of coquetry and coy reluctance—were at his disposal; but the price to be paid for them was a wedding-ring—nothing less. And such was the infatuation she had inspired that the Duke—flinging scruples and fears aside, consented. One October day they took boat to Calais, and were there made man and wife. The widow had caught her Prince and meant the world to know she was a Princess.

For a few indecisive weeks the Duke put off the evil day of announcing his marriage to his brother, the King, and to his mother, the Dowager Princess of Wales, whose frowns he dreaded still more. But his Duchess was inexorable. She declined to play any longer the role of "virtuous mistress" in an obscure French town, when she ought, as a Princess of the Blood Royal, to be circling in splendour and state around the throne.

Between his wife's tears and tantrums on one side of the Channel and the Royal anger on the other, the Duke was driven to the extremity of his exiguous Royal wits; until finally, in sheer desperation, he decided to make the plunge—to break the news to the King. Had he but known how inopportune the time was he would surely have taken the first boat back to Calais rather than face his brother's anger. George was distracted by trouble at home and abroad. His mother was dying; across the Atlantic the clouds of war were massing; the political atmosphere was charged with danger and unrest. And when the quaking Duke presented himself before his brother as he was moodily walking in his palace garden, George was in no mood to accept quietly any addition to his burden of worries.

No sooner had the King read the ill-spelled, clumsily-worded note which the Duke shamefacedly placed in his hand than his anger blazed into flame. "You idiot! You blockhead! You villain!" he shouted, purple in face and hoarse with passion. "I tell you that woman shall never be a Royal Duchess—she shall never be anything." "What must I do, then?" gasped the Duke, quailing before the Royal outburst. "Go abroad until I can decide what to do," thundered the King, waving his brother imperiously away.

It was a very crestfallen Duke who returned to Calais to face the upbraiding of Duchess Anne on his failure. But it took much more than this to cow a Luttrell. She at least was not afraid of any king. She would defy him to his face, and compel him to acknowledge her—before her child was born. And within a few weeks she was installed at Cumberland House, with all the state and more than the airs of a Royal Princess. The days of concealment were over; she stood avowed to the world, Duchess of Cumberland and sister-in-law to the King; and she only smiled when George, in his Royal wrath at such insolence, announced through his Chamberlain that "there was no road between Cumberland House and Windsor Castle—that the Castle doors would be closed against any who dared to visit his repudiated sister-in-law."

There were some, however, who dared to brave George's displeasure by paying court to the Duchess, whose beauty and grace surrounded her with a small body of admirers. The daughter of an Irish nobleman played to perfection her new and exalted role of Princess. "No woman of her time," says Lord Hervey, "performed the honours of her drawing-room with such grace, affability, and dignity." And, in spite of George's frowns, the only real thorn in her bed of roses was the knowledge that the Duchess of Gloucester, who, as the daughter of a Piccadilly sempstress, was infinitely her inferior by birth, and not even her superior in beauty, was received with open arms at the Castle, and drew to her court all the greatest in the land.

She even made overtures to her rival and enemy, and proposed that they should appear together in the same box at the opera—an overture to which the Duchess of Gloucester retorted contemptuously: "Never! I would not smell at the same nosegay with her in public!"

By sheer effrontery Duchess Anne at last forced her way into the Royal Court and public recognition as a member of George's family; and the fact that both the King and the Queen snubbed her mercilessly for her pains, detracted little from her triumph and gratification. What her Grace of Gloucester had won by submission and ingratiating arts, she had won by brazen defiance and importunity. But the goal, though so differently reached, was the same. Her triumph was complete.

To her last day, however, she never forgave the King and Queen. While they had smiled on the sempstress's daughter, who had been guilty of precisely the same offence as herself—that of wedding a Royal Prince without the King's sanction—they had scorned her, a Luttrell, the daughter of a noble house; and terrible was the revenge she took. She deliberately set herself to debase the Prince of Wales—a youth whose natural tendencies made him a pliant tool in her hands. She enmeshed him in the web of her beauty and charms; she pandered to his vanity and his passions; while her husband initiated him into the vices of which he himself was a past-master—drinking, gambling, and lust. Notorious profligate as George IV. became, there is little doubt that he would have been a much better man if he had not fallen thus early into the hands of a revengeful and unprincipled woman. Thus infamously the Duchess of Cumberland repaid George and his Consort for their slights; and her shameless reward was when she witnessed their grief at the moral degradation of their eldest son.

But even in the hour of her greatest triumph and splendour Anne Luttrell was an unhappy woman. She had climbed to the dizziest heights of the social ladder; her pride was more than satisfied; but her heart was empty and desolate. Her fickle husband soon wearied of her charms, and flaunted his fresh conquests before her face. In the royal family circle, into which she had forced her way, she was an unwelcome stranger; and such homage as she received was conceded to her rank and not to herself. "Of all princesses," she once wrote to a friend, "I really think I am the most miserable."

Her husband died at the age of forty-five, worn out with excesses, regretted by none, execrated by many. Of his father it had been written by way of epitaph:—

"He was alive and is dead, And, as it is only Fred, Why, there's no more to be said."

Henry Frederick's epitaph, if it had been written by the same hand, would have been much more scathing. His Duchess survived him a score of years—unhappy years of solitude and neglect, a Princess only in name—harassed and shamed by her eldest sister, Elizabeth, a woman of coarse tastes and language, a confirmed gambler and cheat, whose failings, which she tried in vain to conceal, brought shame on the Duchess.

The fate of Elizabeth—one of the "three beautiful Luttrells"—is among the most tragic stories of the British Peerage. When her Duchess-sister died she drifted into low companionships, was imprisoned for debt, and actually bribed a hairdresser to marry her, in order to recover her liberty. On the Continent, to which she escaped, she fell to still lower depths—was arrested for pocket-picking, and for a time cleaned the streets of Augsburg chained to a wheelbarrow, until a dose of poison set her free from her fetters.



CHAPTER VIII

THE GORGEOUS COUNTESS

If, a century ago, Edmund Power, of Knockbrit, in County Tipperary, had been told that his second daughter, Marguerite, would one day blossom into a Countess, and live in history as one of the "most gorgeous" figures in the fashionable world of London under three kings, he would certainly have considered his prophetic informant an escaped lunatic, and would probably have told him so, with the brutal frankness which was one of his most amiable characteristics.

The Irish squire was a proud man—proud of his pretty and shiftless wife, with her eternal talk of her Desmond ancestors; proud of two of his three daughters, whose budding beauty was to win for them titled husbands—one an English Viscount, the other a Comte de St Marsante; and proudest of all of his own handsome figure and his local dignities. But he was frankly ashamed to own himself father of his second daughter, Marguerite, the "ugly duckling" of a good-looking family, and with no gifts or promise to qualify her plainness.

But the squireen was probably too full of his own self-importance to waste much thought or regret on an insignificant, unattractive girl, though she was his own child. He loved to strut about among his humble neighbours in all the unprovincial glory of ruffles and lace, buck-skins and top-boots, and snowy, wide-spreading cravat. He was the king of Tipperary dandies, known far beyond his own county as "Buck Power" and "Shiver-the-Frills"; and what pleased his vanity still more, he was a Justice of the Peace, with authority to scour the country at the head of a company of dragoons, tracking down rebels and spreading terror wherever he went. That he was laughed at for his coxcombry and hated for his petty tyranny only seemed to add to the zest of his enjoyment of life; and he saw, at least, a knighthood as the prospective recognition of his importance, and his services to the King and the peace.

Such was the father and such the home of Marguerite Power, who was one day to dazzle the world as the "most gorgeous Lady Blessington."

As with many another "ugly ducking" Marguerite Power's beauty was only dormant in these days of childhood; and before she had graduated into long frocks, the bud was opening which was to grow to so beautiful a flower. If her father was blind to the change, it was patent enough to other eyes; and she had scarcely passed her fourteenth birthday when she had at least two lovers eager to pay homage to her girlish charm—Captains Murray and Farmer, brother-officers of a regiment stationed at Clonmel. To the wooing of Captain Murray, young, handsome, and desperately in earnest, she lent a willing ear; but when thus encouraged, he asked her to be his wife, she blushingly declined the offer, on the ground that she was yet much too young to think of a wedding-ring. To the rival Captain, old enough to be her father, a man, moreover, whose evil living and Satanic temper were notorious, she showed the utmost aversion. "I hate him," she protested in tears to her father, who supported his suit; "and I would rather die a hundred times than marry him."

But "Beau Power" was the last man to be moved from his purpose by a child's tears or pleadings. Captain Farmer was a man of wealth and good family, and also one of his own boon companions. And thus, tearful, indignant, protesting to the last, the girl was led to the altar, by the biggest scoundrel in Tipperary—a "maiden tribute" to a lover's lust and a father's ambition.



The child's fears were more than realised in the wedded life that followed. Before the honeymoon had waned, the Captain began to treat his young wife with all the brutality of which he was such a past-master. Blows and oaths were her daily lot; and when his cruelty wrung tears from her, her husband would lock her in her room, and leave her for days, without fire or food, until she condescended to beg for mercy.

After three months of this inferno the Captain was ordered to a distant station; and, as his wife refused point-blank to accompany him, was by no means reluctant to "be rid of the brat" by sending her back to her home. Here, however, the child-wife found herself less welcome than, and almost as unhappy as in her wedded life; and, driven to despair, she left the home in which she had been cradled, and fared forth alone into the world, which could not be more unkind than those whose duty it was to shield and care for her.

How, or where, Beau Power's daughter lived during the next twelve years must always remain largely a mystery. At one time she appears in Dublin; at another, in Cahir; but mostly she seems to have spent her time in England. Over this part of her adventurous life a curtain is drawn; though some have endeavoured to raise it, and have professed to discover scandalous doings for which there seems to be no vestige of authority. We know that, by the time she was twenty, Sir Thomas Lawrence was so struck by her beauty that he immortalised it on canvas; but it is only in 1816 that the curtain is actually raised, and we find her living with her brother in London, where, to quote her sister,

"she received at her house only those whose age and character rendered them safe friends, and a very few others, on whose perfect respect and consideration she could wholly rely. Among the latter was the Earl of Blessington, then a widower."

Whatever may have been her life during this obscure period, when her charms were maturing into such exquisite beauty, it is thus certain that at its close she was moving in a good circle, and was as irreproachable as she was lovely. Of her rascally husband she had happily seen nothing during all those years of more or less lonely adventure; and the end of this tragic union was now near. One day in October 1817, the Captain ended his misspent days in tragedy. He had drifted through dissipation and crime to the King's Bench prison; and in a fit of frenzy—or, as some say, in a drunken quarrel—had flung himself to his death through a window of his gaol.

Thus, at last, the nightmare that had clouded the young life of the squireen's daughter was over, and she was free to plan her future as she would. What this future was to be was soon placed beyond doubt. The widowed Earl of Blessington had long been among the most ardent admirers of the lovely Irishwoman; and before Farmer had been many months in his prison-grave, he had won her consent to be his Countess. The "ugly duckling" had reached a coronet through such trials and vicissitudes as happily seldom fall to the lot of woman; and her future was to be as radiant as her past had been ignoble and obscure.

Seldom has a woman cradled in comparative poverty made such a splendid alliance. Lord Blessington was a veritable Croesus among Irish landlords, with a rent-roll of L30,000 a year; allied, it is true, to an extravagance more than commensurate with his revenue. He had a passion for all things theatrical, and an almost barbaric taste in the gorgeous furnishings with which he loved to surround himself; and this taste his wife seems to have shared.

When the Earl took his bride to his ancestral home, Mountjoy Forest, she revelled in her boudoir, with its hangings of "crimson Genoa silk-velvet, trimmed with gold bullion fringe; and all the furniture of equal richness." But she had had enough of Irish life in the days of her childhood, and soon sighed to return to London and to a wider sphere for her beauty and her social ambition; and before she had been a bride six months we find her installed in St James's Square, drawing to her salon all the greatest and most famous in the land, and moving among her courtiers with the dignity and graciousness of a Queen.

Royal Dukes kissed her hand; statesman basked in her smile; Moore sang his sweetest songs for her delight; and all the arts and sciences worshipped at her shrine, and raved about her beauty of face and graces of mind.

Sated at last with all this splendour and adulation, my Lady Blessington yearned for more worlds to conquer; and so, one August day in 1822, she and her lord set out on a triumphal progress through Europe, with a retinue of attendants, and with luxurious equipages such as a king might have been proud to boast. In France they added to their train Count d'Orsay, who threw up his army-commission under the lure of the Countess's beautiful eyes; and seldom has fair lady had so devoted and charming a cavalier as this "Admirable Crichton" of Georgian days.

"Count d'Orsay," says Charles James Mathews, the famous comedian, who knew him well, "was the beau-ideal of manly dignity and grace. He was the model of all that could be conceived of noble demeanour and youthful candour; handsome beyond all question; accomplished to the last degree; highly educated, and of great literary acquirements; with a gaiety of heart and cheerfulness of mind that spread happiness on all around him. His conversation was brilliant and engaging, as well as instructive. He was, moreover, the best fencer, dancer, swimmer, runner, dresser, the best shot, the best horseman, the best draughtsman, of his age."

Such was the Count, then a youth of nineteen, who thus entered Lady Blessington's life, in which he was to play such an intimate part until its tragic close.

From France the regal progress continued to Italy, everywhere greeted with wonder at its magnificence and admiration of my lady's beauty. Two spring months in 1823 were passed at Genoa, where Lord Byron loved to sit at the Countess's feet and pay homage to her with eye and tongue. From Genoa the procession fared majestically to Rome, of which her ladyship, in spite of the sensation she produced and the adulation she received, soon wearied; she sighed for Naples, where she was regally lodged in the Palazzo Belvidere, a Palace, as she declared, "fit for any queen." And how the squire's daughter revelled in her new pleasure-house, with its courtyard and plashing fountain, its arcade and its colonnade, "supporting a terrace covered with flowers"; its marvellous gardens, filled with the rarest trees, shrubs and plants; and long gallery, "filled with pictures, statues, and bassi-relievi."

"On the top of the gallery," she says, "is a terrace, at the extreme end of which is a pavilion, with open arcades and paved with marble. This pavilion commands a most charming prospect of the bay, the foreground filled up by gardens and vineyards. The odour of the flowers in the grounds around the pavilion, and the Spanish jasmine and tuberoses that cover the walls, render it one of the most delicious retreats in the world. The walls of all the rooms are literally covered with pictures; the architraves of the doors of the principal rooms are oriental alabaster and the rarest marbles; the tables and consoles are composed of the same costly materials; and the furniture bears the traces of its pristine splendour."

Such was the Arabian palace of all delights of which her gorgeous ladyship now found herself mistress; and yet nothing would please her indulgent lord but the spending of a few thousands in adding to its splendours by new and costly furnishings. Here she spent two-and-a-half years of ideal happiness, sailing by moonlight on the lovely bay, with d'Orsay for companion; visiting all the sights, from Pompeii to the galleries and museums, with a retinue of experts, such as Herschell and Gell in her train, and entertaining with a queenly magnificence Italian nobles and all the great ones of Europe who passed through Naples.

From Naples Lady Blessington took her train to Florence, where she cast her spell over Walter Savage Landor, who spent every possible hour in her fascinating company; and where she was joined by her husband's daughter, the Lady Harriet Gardiner, a girl of fifteen, who, within a few weeks of reaching Italy, became the wife of my lady's handsome protege, d'Orsay. And it was not until 1828, six years after leaving London, that the stately procession turned its face homewards, halting for a few months of farewell magnificence in Paris, where Lady Blessington was installed in Marshal Ney's mansion, in an environment even more gorgeous than the Palazzo Belvidere of Naples could boast, thanks to the prodigality of her infatuated lord.

The description which her Ladyship gives of her Paris palace reads, indeed, like a passage from the "Arabian Nights."

"The bed," she says, "which is silvered instead of gilt, rests on the backs of two large silver swans, so exquisitely sculptured that every feather is in alto-relievo, and looks nearly as fleecy as those of a living bird. The recess in which it is placed, is lined with white fluted silk, bordered with blue embossed lace; and from the columns that support the frieze of the recess, pale blue silk curtains, lined with white, are hung. A silvered sofa has been made to fit the side of the room opposite the fireplace—pale blue carpets, silver lamps, ornaments silvered to correspond."

Her bath was of white marble; her salle de bain was draped with white muslin trimmed with lace, and its ceiling was beautiful with a painted Flora scattering flowers and holding an elaborate lamp in the form of a lotus. And all the rest of the equipment of this dream-palace was in keeping with these splendours, from the carpets and curtains of crimson to the gilt consoles, marble-topped chiffonieres, and fauteuils "richly carved and gilt and covered with satin to correspond with the curtains."

This, although Lady Blessington little dreamt it, was to be the last lavish evidence of her lord's devotion to his beautiful wife; for, before they had been many months back in England the Earl died suddenly in the prime of his days. Large as his fortune had been, the last few years of extravagance had made such inroads in it that all that was left of his L30,000 a year was an annual income of L600, which went to his illegitimate son. Fortunately the Countess's jointure of L2,000 a year was secure; and on this income Lady Blessington was able to face the future with a heart as light as it could be after such a bereavement; for, eccentric as her husband had been, and in some ways almost contemptible, she had loved him dearly for the great and touching love with which he had always surrounded her.

It was during her early years of widowhood that her ladyship turned for solace, and also for additional revenue to support the extravagance which had now become second nature, to her pen, in which she quickly found a small mine of welcome gold. Her "Books of Beauty" and "Gems of Beauty" were an instantaneous success—they made a strong appeal to the flowery sentiment of the time, and sold in tens of thousands of copies. Her "Conversations with Byron," a record of those halcyon days at Genoa, fed the curiosity which then invested the most romantic of poets with a glamour which survives to our day; and her novels and gossipy books of travel were hailed in succession by an eager public of readers.

In these years of prolific literary labour she was able to double her jointure, and to maintain much of the splendour to which she had become so accustomed. Even her literary children were cradled in luxury on a fauteuil of yellow satin, in a library crowded with sumptuous couches and ottomans, enamel tables and statutary. To her house in Seamore Place her beauty and fame drew the most eminent men in England, from Lawrence and Lyndhurst to Lytton and young Disraeli, gorgeous as his hostess, in gold-flowered waistcoat, gold rings and chains, white stick with black tassel, and his shower of ringlets.

But the Seamore Place house proved too cabined and too modest for my lady's exacting social ambition. She demanded a more spacious and magnificent shrine for her beauty, which was still so remarkable that she was considered the loveliest woman at the Court of George III. when well advanced in the forties—and this she found at Gore House, in Kensington, a stately mansion in which Wilberforce had made his home, and which, surrounded by beautiful gardens and shut in with a girdle of spreading trees, might have been in the heart of the country, instead of within sight of the tide of fashion which flowed in Hyde Park.

Here for thirteen years, with the handsome, gay, accomplished d'Orsay, who had separated from his wife, as major-domo, she dispensed a princely hospitality. Her dinners and her entertainments were admittedly the finest in London; and invitations to them were as eagerly sought as commands to a Court-ball.

"At Gore House," said Brougham, "one is sure to meet some of the most interesting people in England, and equally sure not to have a dull moment." Brougham was himself a constant and a welcome guest, and the men he met there ranged from Prince Louis Napoleon, then an exile without a prospect of a crown, and the Duke of Wellington to Albert Smith and Douglas Jerrold—so wide was the net of Lady Blessington's hospitality. And all paid the same glowing tribute, not only to their hostess's loveliness but to the warmth of heart, which was one of her greatest charms. And of all the great ones who sat at her dinner-table or thronged her drawing-rooms not one was wittier or more fascinating than Count d'Orsay, who, in spite of envious and malicious tongues, never occupied to the Countess any other relation than that of a dearly-loved and devoted son.

Although Lady Blessington's income rarely fell below L4,000 a year, it was quite inadequate to her expenditure; and it was clear to her that this era of splendid hospitality could not last for ever. A day of reckoning was sure to come; and it came sooner than she had anticipated. D'Orsay, who seems to have been even more careless of money than his mother-in-law, plunged deeper and deeper in debt—some of it, at least, incurred in helping to keep up the Gore House menage—until he found himself at last face to face with liabilities far exceeding L100,000, and besieged with duns and bailiffs. Once he was arrested at the suit of a bootmaker, and was rescued from prison by Lady Blessington's rapidly-emptying purse. The climax came when a sheriff's officer smuggled himself into Gore House, and brought down on d'Orsay's head an avalanche of angry creditors, each resolute to have his "pound of flesh." The Countess was powerless to stem the invasion; her own resources were at an end, the Count himself was penniless. The only safety was in flight; and one day Gore House was found empty. The birds had flown to Paris; and the mansion which had been the scene of so much magnificence was left to the mercy of a horde of clamorous creditors.

A few weeks later, all "the costly and elegant effects of the Right Honourable, the Countess of Blessington, retiring to the Continent" were put up to auction; and twenty thousand curious people were pouring through the rooms which her gorgeous ladyship had made so famous—among them Thackeray, who was moved to tears at the spectacle of so much goodness and greatness reduced to ruin. The sale, although many of the effects brought absurdly low prices, realised L12,000—a smaller sum probably than would be paid to-day for half-a-dozen of the Countess's pictures.

This crushing blow to her fortunes and her pride no doubt broke Lady Blessington's heart; for within a few months of the last fall of the auctioneer's hammer, she died suddenly in Paris, to the unspeakable grief of d'Orsay, who declared to the Countess's physician, Madden, "She was to me a mother! a dear, dear mother—a true, loving mother to me." Three years later this "paragon of all the perfections" followed the Countess behind the veil, and rests in a mausoleum, of his own designing, at Chamboury, with one of the most lovely women who have ever graced beauty with rare gifts of mind and with a warm and tender heart.



CHAPTER IX

A QUEEN OF COQUETTES

The 29th of May in the year 1660 was indeed a red-letter day in the calendar of jovial fox-hunting Squire Jennings, of Sandridge, in Hertfordshire. It was the day on which his Royal idol, the second Charles, set out from Canterbury on the last stage of the journey to his crown. Mounted on his horse, caparisoned in purple and gold, at the head of a gay cavalcade of retainers, he rode proudly through the Kentish lanes and villages: through avenues of wildly-cheering crowds, flinging sweet may-blossoms and flowers under his horse's feet, and waving green boughs over their heads in a frenzy of welcome.



And it was on this very day, as the "Merrie Monarch" was riding under the flowery arches and fluttering pennons of London streets, to the clanging of joy-bells and the thundering of cannon, with a procession twenty thousand strong behind him, that Squire Jennings' daughter first opened her eyes on the world in which, though her simple-minded father little dreamt it, she was destined to play so brilliant a part. No birthday could have been more auspicious than this which saw the restoration of a nation's hope; and the sun which flooded it with splendour was typical of the good fortune that was to gild the life-path of the Sandridge baby.

If on that day Squire Richard had been told that his baby-girl would live to wear a Duchess's coronet and to be the bosom-friend and counsellor of a Queen of England, he would have laughed aloud; and yet Fate had this and more in waiting for Sarah Jennings in the years to come. The Squire himself professed to be no more than a plain country-gentleman, who knew as much as any man about horses and the management of acres, but knew no more of courts and coronets than of the man in the moon.

His family, it is true, had been seated for generations on its broad Hertfordshire lands, and his father had been dubbed a Knight of the Bath when the Prince of Wales, later Charles I., himself received the accolade. His mother, too, was a Thornhurst, of Agnes Court, Old Romney, a family of old lineage and high respectability; but, apart from Sir John, no Jennings had ever aspired even as high as a mere knighthood, and certainly they were as far removed from coronets as from the North Pole.

Squire Jennings had another daughter, Frances, at this time a winsome little maid of eight summers, already showing promise of a rare loveliness. And she, too, was destined to a career, almost as brilliant as, and more adventurous than that of her baby-sister. Her story opened when one day she was transported, as maid-of-honour to the Duchess of York, from the modest home in Hertfordshire to the glamour and splendours of the Royal Court, where her beauty dazzled all eyes.

The Duke of York himself lost his heart at sight of her, and turned on her the battery of his sighs and smiles, his ogling and flattering speeches. When she met his advances with coldness, he bombarded her with notes "containing the tenderest expressions and most magnificent promises," slipping them into her pocket or muff, as opportunity served; but the disdainful beauty dropped the billets-doux on the floor for any one to read who chose to pick them up, until at last the Royal lover was compelled to abandon the pursuit in despair.

James's brother, the King, made violent love to her; and every Court gallant, from the Duke of Buckingham to Henry Jermyn, the richest beau in England, fluttered round her beauty like moths around a candle. How, after many romantic vicissitudes, Frances Jennings gave her heart and hand to Dick Talbot, the handsomest man in the British Isles; how she raised him to a Dukedom, and, as Duchess of Tyrconnel, queened it as Vicereine of Ireland; and how, in later life, she sank from this dizzy pinnacle to such depths of poverty that for a time she was thankful to sell tapes and ribbons in the New Exchange bazaar in the Strand, is one of the most romantic stories in the annals of our Peerage.

While Frances Jennings was coquetting with coronets and playing the madcap at the Court of Whitehall, Sarah was growing to girlhood in her rustic environment in Hertfordshire, more interested in her pony and her toys than in all the baubles that made up the life of that very fine lady her sister, and giving no thought to her beauty, to which each day was adding its touch of grace. But she was not long to remain in such innocence; for one day when she was still but a child of twelve her sister came in a splendid Court carriage, and took her off to London, where a very different life awaited her.

She was not, it is true, to move like Frances in the splendid circle of the Throne, though she was to be on its fringe and to catch many a glimpse of it. Her more modest role was to be playfellow and companion of the Duke of York's younger daughter, Anne—a shy, backward child, a few years younger than herself, who suffered from an affection of the eyes, which practically closed books and the ordinary avenues of education to her.

To such a child cradled in a palace and hedged round by ceremonial, Sarah Jennings, with the superabundant health and vitality of a country-bred girl, was an ideal playmate; and before many days had passed the timid, clinging Princess was the very slave of the vivacious, romping, strong-willed daughter of the squire. Thus was begun that union between the strong and the weak, which in later years was to make Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, virtual Queen of England, while her childish playfellow, Anne, wore the crown.

It was under such conditions that Sarah Jennings blossomed rapidly into young womanhood—little less lovely than her ravishing sister, but infinitely more dowered with strength of mind and character—an imperious young lady, with the cleverest brain and tongue, and the most inflexible will within the circle of the Court.

While Sarah was playing with her Royal charge in the Palace nursery, John Churchill, son of a West Country knight, whose life was to be so closely linked with hers, had already climbed several rungs of the ladder at the summit of which he was to find a Duke's coronet. He had made his first appearance at Court while she was still in the cradle at Sandridge; and although, no doubt, she had caught many a glimpse of the handsome young courtier and favourite of the King, in her eyes he moved in a world apart, as far removed by his splendid environment as by his ten years' superiority in age.

John Churchill was, at least, no better born than herself. He was son of one Winston Churchill, of a stock of West Country gentry, who had flung aside his cap and gown at Oxford to wield a sword for King Charles; and who, when Cromwell took the fallen reins of government into his own hands, was made to pay a heavy price for his loyalty by the forfeiture of his lands and a fine of L4,000. When Charles I.'s son came to his own, Winston's star shone again; his acres were restored, he was dubbed a knight, and was rewarded with well-paid offices under the Crown. Moreover, a place at Court, as page-boy, was found for his young son John; and another, as maid-of-honour to the Duchess of York, for his daughter Arabella.

From the day young Churchill entered the service of James, Duke of York, Fortune smiled her sweetest on him. The Duke was captivated by the boy's handsome face, his intelligence and charming manners, and took him at once into favour. By the time he was sixteen he was a full-blown officer of the Guards, and the idol of the Court. His good looks, his graces of person, and powers of fascinating wrought sad havoc in the breast of many a Court-lady; and, boy though he was, there were few favours which might not have been his without the asking.

Even Barbara Villiers, my Lady Castlemaine, who had for many years been the King's "light o' love," and had borne him three sons, all Dukes-to-be, cast amorous eyes on the handsome young Guardsman; and, what is more, succeeded where beauty failed, in drawing him within the net of her coarse, middle-aged charms. Strange stories are told of the love-making of this oddly-assorted pair, which had a ludicrous conclusion. One day King Charles was informed that if he would take the trouble to go to Lady Castlemaine's rooms he would be rewarded by a singular spectacle—that of young Churchill dallying with his mistress and the mother of his children. And so it proved; for when the King made an unexpected appearance he was just in time to see the lieutenant-Lothario disappearing through an open window and his inamorata on the verge of hysterics on a sofa.

One cannot blame the "Merrie Monarch" for deciding that such activities were better fitted for another field of exercise. The young Lothario was packed off to Tangier to cool his ardour by a little bloodshed; but before he went Lady Castlemaine handed him a farewell present of L5,000 with which, according to Lord Chesterfield, "he immediately bought an annuity of L500 a year of my grandfather Halifax, which was the foundation of his subsequent fortune."

A young man so enterprising and so gifted by nature could scarcely fail to go far, when his energies were directed into a suitable channel. He proved that he could serve under the banner of Mars as gallantly as under the pennon of Cupid. He did such doughty deeds against the Dutch, under Monmouth, that he was made a Captain of Grenadiers. At the siege of Nimeguen his reckless bravery won the unstinted praise of Turenne, who, when one of his own officers cowardly abandoned an important outpost, exclaimed, "I will bet a supper and a dozen of claret that my handsome Englishman will recover the post with half the number of men that the officer commanded who has lost it." And the "handsome Englishman" promptly won the supper for the Marshal. Moreover, by an act of splendid daring, during the siege of Maestricht he saved the Duke of Monmouth's life; and returned to England a hero and a colonel, having thoroughly purged his indiscretion in Lady Castlemaine's boudoir. If he had toyed dangerously with the King's mistress, he had at least saved the life of his Sovereign's best-loved son.

It was at this time that Churchill seems to have first set eyes on Sarah Jennings, now standing on the verge of womanhood, and as sweet a flower as the Court garden of fair girls could show. He saw her moving with queenly grace and dainty freshness among a crowd of the loveliest women at a Royal ball, her proud well-poised head rising above them as a lily towers over meaner flowers. And—such are the strange ways of love—from that first glance he was fascinated by her as no other woman ever had power to fascinate him. When he sought an introduction to her, the bright spirit that shone in her eyes, her clever tongue, and her graciousness quickly forged the chains which he was proud to wear to his life's end. Seldom has a woman's spell worked such quick magic—never has the love it gave birth to proved more loyal and enduring.

But Sarah Jennings was no maid to be easily won by any man—even by a lover so dowered with physical graces and so invested with the halo of romance as John Churchill. She knew all about his heroism on battlefields; she knew also of that little incident in a palace boudoir, and of many another youthful peccadillo of the gallant young colonel. She was no flower to be worn and flung aside; and she meant that Colonel Churchill should know it. She could be gracious to him, as to any other man; but she quickly made the limits of her indulgence clear. To all his amorous advances she presented a smiling and inscrutable front; his ardour was as unwelcome as it was premature.

Had she designed to make a conquest of her martial lover she could not have set to work more diplomatically. Colonel Churchill had basked for years in woman's smiles, often unsought and undesired; to coldness and indifference he was a stranger; but they only served, as becomes a soldier, to make him more resolute on victory. As a subtle tongue and a handsome person made no impression on this frigid beauty, he had recourse to his pen (since his sword was useless for such a conquest) and inundated her with letters, breathing undying devotion, and craving for at least a smile or a look of kindness.

"Show me," he writes, "that, at least, you are not quite indifferent to me, and I swear that I will never love anything but your dear self, which has made so sure a conquest of me that, had I the will, I had not the power ever to break my chains. Pray let me hear from you and know if I shall be so happy as to see you to-night."

But to all his protestations and appeals she returns no response. If she is deaf to the pleadings of love she must, he determined, at least give him her pity. He writes to tell her that he is "extreme ill with the headache," and craves a word of sympathy, as a beggar craves a crust. He vows, in his pain,

"by all that is good I love you so well that I wish from my soul that if you cannot love me, I may die, for life could be to me one perpetual torment. If the Duchess," he adds, "sees company I hope you will be there; but if she does not, I beg you will then let me see you in your chamber, if it be but for one hour. If you are not in the drawing-room you must then send me word at what hour I shall come."

At last the iceberg thaws a little—though it is only to charge him with unkindness! She assumes the role of virtue; and, with a woman's capriciousness, charges her lover with the coldness and neglect which she herself has visited on him.

"Your not writing to me," she says, "made me very uneasy, for I was afraid it was want of kindness in you, which I am sure I will never deserve by any action of mine."

Was ever wayward woman so unjust? For weeks Churchill had been deluging her with ardent letters, to which she had not deigned to answer one word. Now she assumes an air of injured innocence, and accuses him of unkindness! She even promises to see him, but cannot resist the temptation to qualify the concession with a gibe.

"That would hinder you," she says, with delicious, if cruel satire, "from seeing the play, which I fear would be a great affliction to you, and increase the pain in your head, which would be out of anybody's power to ease until the next new play. Therefore, pray consider; and, without any compliment to me, send me word if you can come to me without any prejudice to your health."

At any rate, the Sphinx had spoken and shown that she had some feeling, if only that of pique and unreason; and the despairing lover was able to take a little heart. After all, coquetry, even if carried to the verge of cruelty, holds more promise than Arctic coldness.

But the course of love, which could scarcely be said to have even begun, was not to run at all smoothly. Sir Winston Churchill had set his heart on his son marrying a gilded bride, and he had discovered the very woman for his ambitious purpose—one Catherine Sedley, daughter of his old friend Sir Charles Sedley, a lady, no longer quite young, angular and unattractive, but heiress to much gold and many broad acres. And he lost no time in impressing on his handsome boy the necessity of such an alliance. Pretty maids-of-honour were all very well to practise love-making on; but land and money-bags far outlast and outshine penniless beauty.

For a few undecided weeks the lure seemed to attract Churchill, coupled though it was with the death of his romance. He dallied with the temptation as far as the stage of marriage-settlements; and rumour had it that the match was as good as made. Handsome Jack Churchill was to marry an elderly and gilded spinster, and to mount on her money-bags to greatness!

No sooner had these rumours reached the ear of Sarah Jennings than she flew into a towering rage. "Marry a shocking creature for money!" she raved; "and this was what all his passionate protestations of love amounted to!" Sitting down in her anger she poured out the vials of her wrath on her treacherous swain, bidding him wed his gold.

"As for seeing you," she wrote, "I am resolved I never will in private or in public if I can help it; and, as for the last, I fear it will be some time before I can order so as to be out of your way of seeing me. But surely you must confess that you have been the falsest creature upon earth to me. I must own that I believe I shall suffer a great deal of trouble; but I will bear it, and give God thanks, though too late I see my error."

Never had maid been so cruelly treated by man! After spurning Churchill for months, returning nothing to his ardour and homage but a disdainful shoulder or a gibe, the moment he dares to turn his eyes on any other divinity she is the most outraged woman who ever staked happiness on a man's constancy. But at least her anger served the purpose of bringing Churchill back to his allegiance more promptly than smiles could have done. He, who had never yielded a foot to an enemy on the field of battle, quailed before the tornado of his lady's anger. He broke off the negotiations for his marriage with Miss Sedley, who quickly found a solace in the Duke of York's arms in spite of her lack of beauty, and came back to the feet of his outraged lady on bended knees.

But if she was coy and cold before, she was unapproachable now. In vain did he vow that he had never ceased to love her more than life—that he adored her even more now in her anger than in her indifference.

"I vow to God," he wrote, "you do so entirely possess my thoughts that I think of nothing else in this world but your dear self. I do not, by all that is good, say this that I think it will move you to pity me, for I do despair of your love, but it is to let you see how unjust you are, and that I must ever love you as long as I have breath, do what you will. I do not expect in return that you should either write or speak to me. I beg that you will give me leave to do what I cannot help, which is to adore you as long as I live; and in return I will study how I may deserve, though not have, your love."

Was ever lover more abject, or ever maid so hard of heart, at least in seeming? To this pathetic effusion, which ought to have melted the heart of, and at least wrung forgiveness from, a sphinx, she retorted that he had merely written it to amuse himself, and to "make her think that he had an affection for her when she was assured he had none." At last, however, importunity tells its tale. She consents to see him; but warns him that

"if it be only to repeat those things which you have said so often, I shall think you the worst of men and the most ungrateful; and 'tis to no purpose to imagine that I will be made ridiculous to the world."

Still again she gave signs of thawing. To his next letter, in which he wrote:

"I do love and adore you with all my heart and soul, so much that by all that is good, I do and ever will be better pleased with your happiness than my own,"

she answered:

"If it were sure that you have that passion for me which you say you have, you would find out some way to make yourself happy—it is in your power. Therefore press me no more to see you, since it is what I cannot in honour approve of; and if I have done so much, be as good as to consider who was the cause of it."

At last Churchill had received a crumb of real encouragement. Even the veriest poltroon in love must take heart at such words as these—"you would find out some way to make yourself happy—it is in your power." And it was with a light step and buoyant heart that he went the following day to the Duchess's drawing-room to pursue in person the advantage her letter suggested. But the very moment he entered the room by one door his capricious mistress left it by the other; and when, in his anger at such cavalier treatment, he wrote to ask the meaning of it, and if she did not think it impertinent, she left him in no doubt by answering that she did it "that I may be freed from the trouble of ever hearing from you more!"

Once more Churchill, just as he had begun to hope again, was relegated to the shades of despair. She refused to speak to him, she avoided him in a manner so marked that it became the talk of the Court, and brought her lover into ridicule. To such extremity was he reduced that he actually wrote to her maid to beg her intercession.

"Your mistress's usage to me is so barbarous that sure she must be the worst woman in the world, or else she would not be thus ill-natured. I have sent her a letter which I desire you will give her. I do love her with all my soul, but will not torment her; but if I cannot have her love I shall despise her pity. For the sake of what she has already done, let her read my letter and answer it, and not use me thus like a footman."

In her reply to this letter Sarah assumed again an air of wounded innocence. She had done nothing, she declared, with tears in her pen, to deserve what he had written to her; and since he evidently had such a poor opinion of her she was angry that she had too good a one of him.

"If I had as little love as yourself, I have been told enough of you to make me hate you, and then I believe I should have been more happy than I am like to be now. However," she continued, "if you can be so well contented never to see me, as I think you can by what you say, I will believe you, though I have not other people."

No wonder the poor man was driven to his wits' end by such varied and contradictory moods. After avoiding him for weeks in the most marked and merciless manner she charges him with "being content never to see her." Although she had never uttered or penned a syllable of love in return for his reams of passionate protestations, she taunts him with having less love than herself! Was ever woman so hard to woo or to understand, or lover so patient under so much provocation?

She further accused him of laughing at her when he was "at the Duke's side," to which he retorted "I was so far from that, that had it not been for shame I could have cried." She even swore that it was he who avoided her; and he proves to her that he had followed her elusive shadow everywhere, and had even "made his chair follow him, because I would see if there was any light in your chamber, but I saw none."

But even this arch-coquette recognised that the most devoted lover's forbearance has its bounds, and she was much too clever a woman to strain them too far. When she had brought him to the verge of suicide by her moods and vapours she saw that the time of surrender had come; and when her lover's arm was at last around her waist and her head on his shoulder, she vowed that she had never ceased to love him from the first, and that she had never meant to be unkind!

Thus it came to pass that one winter's day in 1677, at St James's Palace, John Churchill led his bride to the altar, which proved the portal to one of the happiest wedded lives that have ever fallen to the lot of mortals. How little, at that crowning moment, Sarah Churchill could have foreseen those distant days of the future, when she was left to walk alone the last stage of life, in which she would read and re-read, with tear-dimmed eyes, the faded letters which her coldness had wrung from her lover in the flood-tide of his passion and his despair.



CHAPTER X

THE ADVENTURES OF A VISCOUNT'S DAUGHTER

When the Hon. Mary King first opened her eyes in Cork County late in the eighteenth century, her parents, who already had a "quiverful" of offspring, could little have foreseen the tragic chapter in the family annals in which this infant was to play the leading part. Had they done so, they might almost have been pardoned for wishing that she might die in her cradle, a blossom of innocence, before the blighting hand of Fate could sully her.

Her father, Robert, Viscount Kingsborough, was heir to the Earldom of Kingston, and member of a family which had held its head high, and preserved an untarnished 'scutcheon since its founder, Sir John King, won Queen Elizabeth's favour by his zeal in suppressing the Irish rebellion. All its men had been honourable, all its women pure; and it was not until Mary King came on the scene that this fair repute was ever in danger.

Not that there was anything vicious in Lord Kingsborough's young daughter. She was the victim of a weak nature and a lover as unscrupulous as he was handsome and clever. She grew up in the Mitchelstown nursery—one of a dozen brothers and sisters—a wholesome, merry, mischievous girl, with no great pretensions to beauty, but with the fresh charms, the dancing grey eyes, and brown hair (which, in its luxuriant abundance, was her chief glory) of a daughter of Ireland.

Among those whom her bright nature and winsome ways captivated was one Henry Gerald Fitzgerald, the natural son of her mother's brother, and thus her cousin by blood, if not by law. Fitzgerald, who was many years Mary's senior—indeed, at the time this story really opens, he was a married man—had been brought up by Lady Kingsborough as one of her children. He had been the companion of Mary's elder brothers, and Mary's "big playfellow" when she was still nursing her dolls. He was, moreover, a young man of remarkable physical gifts—tall, of splendid figure, and strikingly handsome. It is thus small wonder that the child made a hero of him long before she had emerged from short frocks. When she grew into young womanhood Fitzgerald's attentions to her grew still more marked. He was her constant companion on walks and rides, her partner at dances—in fact, her shadow everywhere, until even her unsuspecting parents began to grow alarmed.

One summer day in 1797, when the Kingsborough family were spending a few weeks by the Thames-side, near Fitzgerald's home at Bishopsgate, the blow fell. Miss King disappeared, leaving behind her a note to the effect that she intended to drown herself in the Thames. Her family and friends were distracted. The river was dragged, but no trace of the missing girl was found. On the river bank, however, were discovered her bonnet and shawl, mute witnesses to the fate that seemed to have overtaken her. Her father alone refused to believe that his daughter had ended her life tragically. He persisted in his search for her, and was soon rewarded by a clue which threw a different and more ominous light on her fate.

From a postboy he learned that a young lady, answering exactly to the description of his daughter, had been driven, in the company of a handsome man, to London, where they had walked off arm in arm together. In London they had vanished; and advertisements and placards offering large rewards failed to discover a trace of them. Then it was that Lord Kingsborough's suspicions fixed themselves firmly on Fitzgerald. He and no other must have been the scoundrel who had done this dastardly deed—a shameful return for all the kindness lavished on him by the family of the girl he had abducted.

When his lordship sought Fitzgerald out, and charged him with his infamy, he was met with open surprise and honest indignation. So far from being the guilty man, Fitzgerald avowed the utmost disgust at the deed, and declared that he would know no rest until the girl had been restored to her parents, and the miscreant properly punished. And from this time no one appeared to be more zealous in the search for the runaway than her abductor.

For weeks all their efforts to trace the fugitive proved of no avail, until one day a girl of the lower-classes called on Lady Kingsborough, to whom she told the following strange tale. She was, she said, servant at a boarding-house in Kennington, to which, some weeks earlier (in fact, at the very time of the disappearance), a gentleman had brought a young lady who answered to the advertised description of the missing girl, especially in her profusion of beautiful hair, which fell below the knees. The gentleman, she continued, often visited the girl.

"It must be my daughter!" exclaimed Lady Kingsborough. "But who is the gentleman? Pray describe him as fully as you can." "He is tall and handsome——" began the girl. At that moment the door opened, and in walked Fitzgerald himself. "Why," exclaimed the servant, as with startled eyes she looked at the intruder, "that's the very gentleman who visits the lady!"

For once Fitzgerald's coolness deserted him. At the damning words he turned and dashed out of the room, thus confirming the worst suspicions against him. The rage and indignation of the injured family were boundless. Such an outrage could only be wiped out with blood, and within an hour Colonel King, elder brother of the wronged girl, called on Fitzgerald, with Major Wood as second, struck him on the cheek, and demanded a meeting on the following morning.

The next day at dawn the duellists met near the Magazine in Hyde Park, Colonel King bringing with him his second and a surgeon. Fitzgerald came alone. He had been unable to find a friend to accompany him. Even the surgeon, when requested, point blank refused to undertake the dishonourable office of second to such a miscreant. The combatants were placed ten yards apart, and, at the signal, two shots rang out. Neither man was touched. Again and again shots were exchanged, and both men remained uninjured.

After the fourth ineffectual exchange Major Wood tried to make peace between the duellists. But Colonel King turned a deaf ear alike to his second and to Fitzgerald, to whom he said: "You are a —— villain, and I will not hear a word you have to offer!" Once more the duellists took up their positions, three more shots were exchanged without the least effect, and, as Fitzgerald's ammunition was now exhausted, the combatants left the ground, after making another appointment for the next day. The next day, however, both were placed temporarily under lock and key, to prevent a further breach of the peace.

Meanwhile, the unhappy girl had been rescued from the Kennington lodging-house, and taken back to the family seat at Mitchelstown, where at least she ought to be safe from further harm from the scoundrelly Fitzgerald. The Kings, however, had not reckoned on the desperate, vindictive nature of the man, who was now more resolute than ever to get Mary into his power.

Disguising himself, he journeyed to Cork, carrying the fight into the enemy's camp. He took up his quarters at the Mitchelstown Inn to develop his plans for a second abduction. But in his scheming Fitzgerald had literally "bargained without his host," who chanced to be an old trusted retainer of the King family, and who from the first was not a little suspicious of the strange guest, who kept so mysteriously indoors all day and walked abroad at night.

No honest man would act in this secretive way, he thought. There had been strange "goings-on" lately; and the least he could do was to communicate his fears to Lord Kingsborough, in case his guest should be "up to some mischief." His lordship, who was away from home, hurried back to Mitchelstown, convinced, from the description, that the suspected man was none other than Fitzgerald himself, and arrived at the inn only to discover that the bird had already flown.

Luckily, it was no difficult matter to trace the fugitive in the wilds of County Cork. The postboy who had driven him was easily found, and from him it was learnt that the stranger had been put down at the Kilworth Hotel. There was no time to be lost. Jumping on to his horse, Lord Kingsborough accompanied by his son, the Colonel, raced as fast as spurs and whip could take him to Kilworth, and demanded to see the newly-arrived guest at the hotel. A waiter, despatched to the guest's room, returned with the announcement that his door was locked, and that he refused to see any one. But the pursuers had heard and recognised the voice through the closed door. It was Fitzgerald himself.

Bursting with rage and indignation, father and son rushed up the stairs and demanded that Fitzgerald should come out. When he refused with oaths, they broke in the door—and found themselves face to face with a brace of pistols. Before they could be used, however, Colonel King, stooping suddenly, made a dash at Fitzgerald, closed with him, and was at once engaged in a life and death struggle. Backward and forward the combatants swayed, straining every muscle to bring their pistols into play for the fatal shot. By an almost superhuman effort, Fitzgerald at last wrested his right arm free. His pistol was pointed at the Colonel's head. But before he could press the trigger, a shot rang out, and he fell back dead, shot through the heart. Lord Kingsborough had killed his daughter's betrayer to save his son's life.

The news of the tragedy flew throughout the country, in all the distorted forms that such news assumes on passing from mouth to mouth. But wherever it travelled—from the shebeens of Connemara to the coffee-houses of Cheapside—it carried with it a wave of compassion for the assassin and execration for his victim. As for Lord Kingsborough, he confessed to a friend: "God knows, I don't know how I did it; but I wish it had been done by some other hand than mine!"

As was inevitable, the Viscount and his son were arrested on a charge of murder. Colonel King was tried at the Cork Assizes, and acquitted to a salvo of deafening cheers, as there was no prosecution. For Lord Kingsborough a different escape was reserved. Before he could be brought to trial at Cork, his father, the Earl of Kingston, died, and the Viscount became an Earl, with all the privileges of his rank—including that of trial by his Peers.

In May 1798, a month after his son's acquittal, Lord Kingston's trial took place in the House of Lords, with all the state and ceremony appropriate to this exalted tribunal. Preceded by the Masters in Chancery, the judges in scarlet and ermine, by the minor lords and a small army of eldest sons, the Peers filed in long and stately procession into the House, followed by the Lord High Steward, the Earl of Clare, walking alone in solitary dignity.